My commentary on creation, evolution, intelligent design and the evidence for Christianity being objectively true. I am an Australian Christian old-Earth creationist biologist who accepts universal common ancestry (but not evolution).

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

[Left: Organic chemist and origin-of-life theorist, Graham Cairns-Smith's, "Seven Clues to the Origin of Life" (1985). Though a devout materialist, Cairns-Smith demolishes all other origin-of-life theories except his own clay theory, which however, as Wikipedia notes, "the 'clay theory' of abiogenesis has not been widely accepted"! See `tagline' quotes below (my emphasis bold), all from Cairns-Smith's books.]

"There is no difficulty in principle in accounting for the existence of many different kinds of proteins. A chain of 150 amino acid units represents quite a small protein; but with 20 alternative possibilities for each link the total number of different chain sequences that are possible is 20150, i.e. 10195-far more than `the number of electrons in the universe'-and most proteins are far longer than 150 units. But the central problem remains: how can diversity of sequence give rise to such a rich diversity of function? Why is it, for example, that the sequence ... corresponds to a molecule that can store oxygen, while ... , although quite incompetent as a one-molecule oxygen cylinder, is very good at breaking up RNA molecules by splitting just one kind of bond in the main chain in just one way? Then again, how is it that ... lacks any appetite for RNA but has a neat way of destroying bacteria by unstitching their overcoats? How can specific complex functions be carried out by such molecular cryptograms? The broad answer seems to be this: the 'cryptogram'- the primary structure-determines in detail the way in which the chain will collapse on itself, its tertiary structure. The `cryptogram' may thus determine accurately the form of a piece of machinery about a millionth of a centimetre across." (Cairns-Smith, A.G., "The Life Puzzle: On Crystals and Organisms and on the Possibility of a Crystal as an Ancestor," University of Toronto Press: Toronto ON, Canada, 1971, pp.34-35).

"Now, how would you go about making a machine which could reproduce itself? ... The mathematician, von Neumann, demonstrated in the 1940s that a self-reproducing machine was in principle quite possible-and he outlined a general design (Taub, 1963; Moore, 1964). Von Neumann imagined some kind of stockroom containing fairly simple mechanical parts-such as screws, metal plates, wire, and so on. The problem was to invent a machine that could move about such a stockroom selecting the pieces required to make another machine like itself, and then proceed to do so. The centre of von Neumann's design was a set of instructions written, say, on magnetic tape or punched cards, giving an account of how to make the rest of the machine-where to find the parts and how to put them together. The machine would include a manufacturing unit which could follow the instructions and act on them. There is a special point about the instructions themselves, however; they could not be remade by following instructions that were different from themselves. ... At some point it must be the cards themselves that instruct their own formation, i.e. the cards must be replicated. Only in this way can an infinite regression be avoided. So in addition to a manufacturing unit that can make all kinds of things by following instructions, there must be another unit with the more limited task of copying them. ... Von Neumann's machine solves the problem of 'self-reproduction' in much the same way as it is solved in organisms: by separating the system formally into two parts. One part is completely coded in the form of replicable plans for its construction held in the other part. The machine has a phenotype and a genetic material (which may be cardboard) holding a genotype." (Cairns-Smith, 1971, pp.52-53).

"But these processes do not occur in vacuo. DNA, RNA, and protein are made out of units which must either be provided by the environment or synthesised by the cell from molecules which are provided. In the latter case whole teams of enzymes may be required. But even if the units are already available in the general environment, the replication of DNA still needs at least one protein, the synthesis of RNA another, and the synthesis of protein needs yet another polymerising enzyme, together with at least a couple of dozen more proteins in the enzymes which prime the transfer RNAs. To make one protein the cell already has to have dozens of proteins. There is nothing immediately illogical in this situation: a factory for making nuts and bolts can be made with the help of nuts and bolts, but it does mean that a cell must inherit more than a book of instructions from its parent. It must inherit also enough pre-formed equipment to read the book. It must inherit a `minimum phenotype'. A reproducing cell, then, must consist of at least a minimum phenotype together with the instructions required to reproduce it-a minimum genotype. Morowitz (1966) has estimated that for a minimum cell consistent with the current viewpoint of molecular biology one would need at least 45 proteins. ... It is still a gross oversimplification since, among other things, it ignores reactions required to provide energy for the various processes, as well as essential mechanical structures such as cell membranes. The problem of the origin of life is simply that any conceivable such minimum unit would seem to be necessarily far too complex to have arisen by chance-to have `nucleated' spontaneously-under any reasonable circumstances. `Life can only come from life' is no longer a dogma as it was in the immediate post-Pasteur era: but it nevertheless seems that life in fact always does arise thisway, and that in nature it must-forany form built on the modern DNA -> protein design." (Cairns-Smith, 1971, pp.60-61).

"Surely there was a radically simpler plan to begin with. What was it like? Von Neumann's 'self-reproducing' machines seem to indicate that quite a complex phenotype, together with a corresponding genotype is essential for any reproducing system. Is there a way out? There must be if life really did originate spontaneously as a reasonably probable physico-chemical event during the history of the Earth." (Cairns-Smith, 1971, pp.61-62. Emphasis original).

"It seems to me that the idea of coupling agents putting together polypeptides on a lifeless Earth adds another dimension of unreality to an already unreal line of thought. Remember that primordial simulations generally give only low yields of amino acids. Remember that the products are tars and that suggestions for prevital work-up procedures are usually absent. Remember the difficulties anyway in building up concentrations of solutions of amino acids or of the cyanide or phosphate to make a coupling agent. Remember that even from laboratory bottles the agents in question do not work very well. Remembering all that, now add the thought that coupling agents are rather unspecific. If a well chosen coupling agent under well chosen laboratory conditions can effectively join the acyl group A to the nucleophile B that is because among the choices exercised by the experimenter was the crucial one of only putting A and B into a flask for the coupling agent to couple. Compared with such carefully arranged marriages the affairs of a primordial soup would have been grossly promiscuous." (Cairns-Smith, A.G., 1982, "Genetic Takeover and the Mineral Origins of Life," Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, Reprinted, 1987, pp.52-53).

"One can get an impression of what is needed in practice for the synthesis of peptides by considering the machinery that is used in automated procedures. One such piece of equipment is shown in figure 1.11. Merrifield, Stewart & Jernberg (1966) describe its construction and operation in nine close pages of diagrams and descriptions. I quote (more or less at random) from the middle of their paper: `... the rear disk contains a center port and one circumferential port which are joined by a 1.5 mm hole within the disk. As this disk is turned it connects one at a time the 12 inlet ports to the central outlet port. A leak-free seal between the two teflon disks of the valve ...' And that is one of the less terse passages. Not shown in figure 1.11 is a programmer, like a musical box drum, that puts appropriate operations (mixings, rinsings, shakings, etc.) in sequence. There have to be many pegs on the drum because one cycle of the automatic synthetic procedure that extends the peptide chain by one unit requires nearly 90 steps. Now I am not saying that for peptide synthesis without human intervention there has to be something physically like Merrifield's machine. There does not have to be that particular piece of engineering. But I think there has to be engineering. Another example of automatic peptide synthesis is the synthesis by the ribosome in the modern cell. ... There are no tubes or valves or metering pumps here: but in the design of the ribosome, the adaptor RNA molecules and their activating enzymes; in the whole system, with its message tapes and its code, there is surely at least as much engineering as in Merrifield's machine. ... Perhaps there is some other way of making peptides with more or less specified amino acid sequences; and perhaps this way does not need detailed control. Perhaps it could then have operated before there was life on Earth, before that engineer, natural selection, appeared on the scene. But it is difficult to see how this could have been so. I think we would know by now if there was some much easier way." (Cairns-Smith, 1982, pp.53,55).

"The implausibility of prevital nucleic acidIf it is hard to imagine polypeptides or polysaccharides in primordial waters it is harder still to imagine polynucleotides. But so powerful has been the effect of Miller's experiment on the scientific imagination that to read some of the literature on the origin of life (including many elementary texts) you might think that it had been well demonstrated that nucleotides were probable constituents of a primordial soup and hence that prevital nucleic acid replication was a plausible speculation based on the results of experiments. There have indeed been many interesting and detailed experiments in this area. But the importance of this work lies, to my mind, not in demonstrating how nucleotides could have formed on the primitive Earth, but in precisely the opposite: these experiments allow us to see, in much greater detail than would otherwise have been possible, just why prevital nucleic acids are highly implausible. Let us consider some of the difficulties. First, as we have seen, it is not even clear that the primitive Earth would have generated and maintained organic molecules. All that we can say is that there might have been prevital organic chemistry going on, at least in special locations. Second, high-energy precursors of purines and pyrimidines had to be produced in a sufficiently concentrated form (for example at least 0.01 M HCN). Third, the conditions must now have been right for reactions to give perceptible yields of at least two bases that could pair with each other. Fourth, these bases must then have been separated from the confusing jumble of similar molecules that would also have been made, and the solutions must have been sufficiently concentrated. Fifth, in some other location a formaldehyde concentration of above 0.01 M must have built up. Sixth, this accumulated formaldehyde had to oligomerise to sugars. Seventh, somehow the sugars must have been separated and resolved, so as to give a moderately good concentration of, for example, D-ribose. Eighth, bases and sugars must now have come together. Ninth, they must have been induced to react to make nucleosides. (There are no known ways of bringing about this thermodynamically uphill reaction in aqueous solution: purine nucleosides have been made by dry-phase synthesis, but not even this method has been successful for condensing pyrimidine bases and ribose to give nucleosides (Orgel & Lohrmann, 1974).) Tenth, whatever the mode of joining base and sugar it had to be between the correct nitrogen atom of the base and the correct carbon atom of the sugar. This junction will fix the pentose sugar as either the α- or ß-anomer of either the furanose or pyranose forms ... For nucleic acids it has to be the ß-furanose. (In the dry-phase purine nucleoside syntheses referred to above, all four of these isomers were present with never more than 8 % of the correct structure.) Eleventh, phosphate must have been, or must now come to have been, present at reasonable concentrations. (The concentrations in the oceans would have been very low, so we must think about special situations - evaporating lagoons and such things (Ponnamperuma, 1978).) Twelfth, the phosphate must be activated in some way - for example as a linear or cyclic polyphosphate - so that (energetically uphill) phosphorylation of the nucleoside is possible. Thirteenth, to make standard nucleotides only the 5'-hydroxyl of the ribose should be phosphorylated. (In solid-state reactions with urea and inorganic phosphates as a phosphorylating agent, this was the dominant species to begin with (Lohrmann & Orgel, 1971). Longer heating gave the nucleoside cyclic 2',3'-phosphate as the major product although various dinucleotide derivatives and nucleoside polyphosphates are also formed (Osterberg, Orgel & Lohrmann, 1973).) Fourteenth, if not already activated - for example as the cyclic 2',3'- phosphate - the nucleotides must now be activated (for example with polyphosphate; Lohrmann, 1976) and a reasonably pure solution of these species created of reasonable concentration. Alternatively, a suitable coupling agent must now have been fed into the system. Fifteenth, the activated nucleotides (or the nucleotides with coupling agent) must now have polymerised. Initially this must have happened without a pre-existing polynucleotide template (this has proved very difficult to simulate (Orgel & Lohrmann, 1974)); but more important, it must have come to take place on pre-existing polynucleotides if the key function of transmitting information to daughter molecules was to be achieved by abiotic means. This has proved difficult too. ...Sixteenth, the physical and chemical environment must at all times have been suitable - for example the pH, the temperature, the M2+ concentrations. Seventeenth, all reactions must have taken place well out of the ultraviolet sunlight; that is, not only away from its direct, highly destructive effects on nucleic acid-like molecules, but away too from the radicals produced by the sunlight, and from the various longer lived reactive species produced by these radicals. Eighteenth, unlike polypeptides, where you can easily imagine functions for imprecisely made products (for capsules, ion-exchange materials, etc.), a genetic material must work rather well to be any use at all - otherwise it will quickly let slip any information that it has managed to accumulate. Nineteenth, what is required here is not some wild one-off freak of an event: it is not true to say `it only had to happen once'. A whole set-up had to be maintained for perhaps millions of years: a reliable means of production of activated nucleotides at the least. Now you may say that there are alternative ways of building up nucleotides, and perhaps there was some geochemical way on the early Earth. But what we know of the experimental difficulties in nucleotide synthesis speaks strongly against any such supposition. However it is to be put together, a nucleotide is too complex and metastable a molecule for there to be any reason to expect an easy synthesis. You might want to argue about the nineteen problems that I chose: and I agree that there is a certain arbitrariness in the sequence of operations chosen. But if in the compounding of improbabilities nineteen is wrong as a number that would be mainly because it is much too small a number. If you were to consider in more detail a process such as the purification of an intermediate you would find many subsidiary operations - washings, pH changes and so on. (Remember Merrifield's machine: for one overall reaction, making one peptide bond, there were about 90 distinct operations required.)." (Cairns-Smith, 1982, p.56-59. Emphasis original).

"Problems for primitive heterotrophsLet us suppose that all the difficulties that we have been discussing were somehow overcome, and let us now consider how the very first organisms might have fared. According to the doctrine of chemical evolution these organisms were heterotrophs, that is to say they depended on organic foods. The diet of primordial soup was so adequate, it is said, that these organisms had no need for metabolic pathways to begin with. Such pathways could evolve gradually as the foods ran out (by the mechanism proposed by Horowitz in 1945; see figure 1.12). A -> B -> C -> D .... According to Horowitz (1945 [Horowitz, N.H., "On the Evolution of Biochemical Syntheses," Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 31, No. 6, June 1945, pp.153-157]), a metabolic pathway would have evolved backwards. D was at first a vital molecule available in the environment. D gradually ran out, giving organisms time to evolve an internal source - by converting C, some simpler precursor, that was still in the environment. As C ran out there would then be selection pressures to find some other environmental molecule, B, and the means to convert it to C. Hence complex molecules that were originally provided by a primordial soup came to be made instead from simple commonly available molecules such as CO2 and N2. To have one's food provided sounds like an easy sort of life, but in reality there would be great difficulties with such an idea. There are problems of assimilation. To be a heterotroph implies an ability to recognise molecules, or at the very least to distinguish between classes of them. For the eventual evolution of metabolic pathways, specific recognition devices would be required. Thinking along the lines of current means of biomolecular control, some kind of structure would seem to be needed that could form specific sockets corresponding to the molecules in the environment. But until you have the ability to recognise at least some molecular units, how do you reach the point of being able to manufacture such specific devices? ... The trouble is that a socket (such as that in an enzyme or a transport protein) that can recognise another molecule is much more difficult to engineer than the molecule itself. ... So what were the control techniques? How was tarry chaos avoided? If the enzymes in today's cells can cope so well this is partly because the molecules that they come across belong to a quite limited set. An enzyme may distinguish between D- glucose and D-fructose, because these are among the relatively few kinds of molecules that it encounters: but it can easily be confused by molecules from a larger range. ... A primitive organism, lacking such customs control and living in a tarry `broth' that contained for every `correct' molecule a myriad of similar `incorrect' ones would have to have far more accurate enzymes to bring about any particular sequence of reactions. So that is the problem: how to evolve accurate recognising structures from a molecular technology that probably could not tell glycine from alanine, let alone D from L. Until you know one molecule from another how do you start to do the kind of sophisticated chemistry needed to make the membranes, the active centres and so on, on which molecular discrimination depends?" (Cairns-Smith, 1982, pp.59-60).

"Was 'chemical evolution' the connection? I do not think so. The building up of a primordial soup, if such a thing ever happened, would have been part of environmental evolution. The oceans would have accumulated organic molecules in much the same way as any other geochemical process would have taken place. Unless you take a religious or mystical view there was no guiding hand to contrive an outcome suitable for the origin of life. Mountains were made and worn down, the wind blew, the sun shone - and a soup did or did not form: all such processes were on an equal footing; it would only have been with an eye to the future that some of these processes might have been given a special label and called 'chemical evolution'. Biological evolution, on the other hand, is special, as discussed in the opening pages of this book. Above all what makes it special is heredity. This is the great divide: either there is a long-term hereditary mechanism working or there is not. If there is not then there is no accumulation of 'know-how' as Kuhn (1976) put it: the survival or non-survival of some putative half-organism will not be 'remembered' in the distant future to have any effect. Things would change, systems such as coacervates would come and go, but you could not expect them to become more efficient: you would not expect them to become more efficient at organic chemical operations, for example. Only evolving organisms can progress in that sort of way. Suppose that by chance some particular coacervate droplet in a primordial ocean happened to have a set of catalysts, etc. that could convert carbon dioxide into D- glucose. Would this have been a major step forward towards life? Probably not. Sooner or later the droplet would have sunk to the bottom of the ocean and never have been heard of again. It would not have mattered how ingenious or life-like some early system was; if it lacked the ability to pass on to offspring the secret of its success then it might as well never have existed." (Cairns-Smith, 1982, pp.69-70).

"There are two counter-intuitive aspects here. Using higher animals as models we would be much more inclined to see the organism as dynamic and the environment as static. But the only bit of an organism that is unambiguously not part of the environment is the bit that is static - the genotype. The other counter-intuitive idea is that, in computer jargon, it is software in organisms that lasts, while hardware is being perpetually replaced. Consider, for example, the instructions about how to make cytochrome c molecules: that software has remained little altered in essentials while mountain ranges have risen and been worn away many times. Yet the hardware, the actual individual protein molecules, individual DNA molecules, and so on, have been quite evanescent, flickering in and out of existence on a geological time scale. And this is very close to the heart of the problem ... we might say that life can begin to appear when mechanisms exist for retaining and propagating a kind of software - genetic information - indefinitely." (Cairns-Smith, 1982, p.80).

"Perhaps the simplest kinds of organisms would be hardly more than pieces of unencumbered information-printing machinery - `naked genes' as they have been called (Muller, 1929). To have the potential for indefinite evolution into the future, the potential information capacity of these naked genes would have to be very high. ... the idea of a 'naked gene', as the simplest and first kind of organism, has a long history. It is somewhat out of favour now mainly on account of two kinds of argument that are put up against it. First, there is a practical argument. Even if it could evolve in principle, it is said, such a structure would be too improbable in practice: it would be exceedingly unlikely to form, and the Earth would be exceedingly unlikely to continue to provide the highly specialised components needed to keep it replicating. If we think about a naked nucleic acid molecule such an attitude seems justified. Second, there is a formal argument. To evolve, a system must have both a genotype and a phenotype. Pure information is no use: it is the phenotype on which selection operates to give genetic information a meaning. Formally this argument is impeccable, but it is largely irrelevant. A `naked gene' would not be - could not be - pure genotype. Clearly what is meant by a gene, in this context at least, is some sort of structure that is holding information - something analogous to a DNA molecule or a punched card. Such a thing is not pure software as it includes the structure that is holding the information, and that is hardware. And at least some aspects of hardware could very well be phenotype." (Cairns-Smith, 1982, p.81).

"All such speculations that I have come across are evolutionary - they talk of the gradual perfection of this and that subsystem. But there is only one engine for the evolution of ingenious competence that I know of and that is natural selection. To evolve, the subsystems have to be part of an organism of some sort. Now there might be no need to postulate an earlier kind of life if some minimum nucleic acid-protein system could be conceived of as having formed spontaneously on the primitive Earth. But I do not see such a system as conceivable. You say yourself that naked nucleic acid genes are no good, and anything else would be more complicated - nucleic acid plus something else. I see no alternative to postulating some other kind of starter life to provide the milieu within which our kind of life system began its evolution." (Cairns-Smith, 1982, p.130).

"Biology has become, quite simply, the study of the causes and effects of evolution, and the question of the origin of life is, first, the question of the origin of evolution." (Cairns-Smith A.G., 1985, "Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story," Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1993, Reprinted, p.1).

"The optimism persists in many elementary textbooks. There is even, sometimes, a certain boredom with the question; as if it was now merely difficult because of an obscurity of view, a difficulty of knowing now the details of distant historical events. What a pity if the problem had really become like that! Fortunately it hasn't. It remains a singular case (Sherlock Holmes' favourite kind): far from there being a million ways in detail in which evolution could have got under way, there seems now to have been no obvious way at all. The singular feature is in the gap between the simplest conceivable version of organisms as we know them, and components that the Earth might reasonably have been able to generate. This gap can be seen more clearly now. It is enormous." (Cairns-Smith, 1985, p.4).

"Now I cannot deny all these possibilities: life on the Earth may be a miracle, or a freak, or an alien infection. And I agree that the confidence was misplaced that supposed in the fifties that the answer to the origin of life would appear in some footnote to the answer to the question of how organisms work. Something much more will be needed. Something odd." (Cairns-Smith, 1985, p.8).

"So please respect the humble bacterium that is playing this game. It can reproduce, it can evolve. E. coli must have some sort of long-term memory about how to make itself that can outlast its substance. That means that an E. coli must be an automatic factory containing something analogous to control tapes and automatic manufacturing equipment. And that is only part of it. All the equipment must be contained, organised, fed. Pieces for it to work on, energy to drive it, must be provided by the E. coli cell. Apart from the manufacturing machinery that can follow instructions, there has also to be another kind of machinery that instead reprints them - something analogous to a Xerox machine or a tape copier. All these things have to be contrived through the manufacturing machinery duly instructed by appropriate bits of the Library tape. It may seem hardly surprising that no one has ever actually made a self-reproducingmachine, even though Von Neumann laid down the design principles more than 40 years ago. You can imagine a clanking robot moving around a stock-room of raw components (wire, metal plates, blank tapes and so on) choosing the pieces to make another robot like itself. You can show that there is nothing logically impossible about such an idea: that tomorrow morning there could be two clanking robots in the stock-room...(I leave it as a reader' home project to make the detailed engineering drawings.) There is nothing clanking about E. coli; yet it is such a robot, and it can operate in a stock-room that is furnished with only the simples raw components. Is it any wonder that E. coli's message tape is long? (... about 10 kilometres long.) Is it any wonder that no free-living organisms have been discovered with message tapes below '2 kilometres'? Is it any wonder that Von Neumann himself, and many others, have found the origin of life to be utterly perplexing?'" (Cairns-Smith, 1985, pp.14-15. Emphasis original).

"There are many thoughtful and knowledgeable people, nowadays, who don't understand the origin of life. This is in spite of a 'big picture' provided by a theory known as 'chemical evolution'. Like the phlogiston theory, 'chemical evolution' looks good from a distance, and there is a common-sense about it. But, to my mind, like the phlogiston theory, it fails to carry through an initial promise: it fails at the more detailed explanations." (Cairns-Smith, 1985, p.34).

"I will grant that the path of chemical evolution seems sensible and in the right direction. There are a few obvious puddles to be avoided and some of the flagstones are a bit uneven, perhaps. but there is the promise of an easy walk up to the foothills of the mountain that we can see straight ahead of us. It is a promise that is unfulfilled. The trouble with this path is that it leads us toward, but it does not lead us to expect, a sudden near-vertical cliff-face. Suddenly in our thinking we are faced with the seemingly unequivocal need for a fully working machine of incredible complexity: a machine that has to be complex, it seems, not just to work well but to work at all." (Cairns-Smith, 1985, p.37).

"It is true that some of the simpler amino acids have been found in complex mixtures generated under conditions simulating those that might have been present on the primitive Earth. Even nucleotide letters have been found in mixtures that are said to be plausible simulations of probiotic products. But all such 'molecules of life' are always minority products and usually no more than traceproducts. Their detection often owes more to the skill of the experimenter than to any powerful tendency for the 'molecules of life' to form." (Cairns-Smith, 1985, pp.44-45).

"Sugars are particularly trying. While it is true that they form from formaldehyde solutions, these solutions have to be far more concentrated than would have been likely in primordial oceans. And the reaction is quite spoilt in practice by just about every possible sugar being made at the same time - and much else besides. Furthermore the conditions that form sugars also go on to destroy them. Sugars quickly make their own special kind of tar - caramel - and they make still more complicated mixtures if amino acids are around." (Cairns-Smith, 1985, p.44).

"In sum the ease of synthesis of 'the molecules of life' has been greatly exaggerated. It only applies to a few of the simplest and in no case is it at all easy to see how the molecules would have been sufficiently unencumbered by other irrelevant or interfering molecules to have allowed further organisation to higher-order structures of the kinds that would be needed: message tapes, selective control structures, etc. Finally, even if ... primitive geochemistry had shown a precision in organic reaction control quite unlike modern geochemistry; even if it had produced all 'the molecules of life' and nothing but 'the molecules of life' in ample amounts; even then it would still only have reached the edges of the real problem ... Still, somehow, an evolving machine had to be made." (Cairns-Smith, 1985, p.44).

"Nucleotides and lipids have yet to be made under conditions that are realistic simulations of primitive Earth conditions. Nucleotides and lipids are much too complicated and particular for this to be surprising. They have all the appearance of molecules specially contrived for particular purposes. ... Perhaps you still feel that `time, and more time, and the resource of oceans' could have overcome the problems of how the more complex 'molecules of life' were originally made. I will now try to dispel such optimism by considering in more detail the most critical of all 'the molecules of life'. ... The Sigma Company is one of several that compete to supply biochemicals for research purposes. Looking through their catalogue I find that I can buy a gram of ATP - a primed ('wound-up') RNA nucleotide - for about £5. ATP is only as cheap as this because it is relatively easy to extract from bulk biological materials - horse meat to be more specific.The other three primed RNA nucleotides are about ten times the price, and the primed DNA nucleotides cost about £300 per gram. But even these are only as cheap as they are because they are derived from natural biological materials. As with postage stamps the price of nucleotides rises steeply with more abnormal types. The version of ATP with the sugar arabinose in the connector piece in place of ribose comes in at about £6000 a gram. But even such abnormal nucleotides, if they are synthetic (man-made) at all, are never wholly synthetic. Their manufacture will have started with components such as ribose obtained from biological sources. ... So £6000 a gram (or if you prefer £6M a kilogram) is a low estimate for the cost of a primed nucleotide 'in the open Universe' as it were. What would these materials cost if it were not for the horses (and others) that do most of the hard work? What would it actually cost to manufacture primed nucleotides from methane, ammonia and phosphate rock? I hate to think. Contrast glycine and alanine, the two simplest amino acids. These really can be said to be easily made-they have been detected frequently in complex mixtures from sparking experiments, in meteorites, etc. Glycine comes in at about 1p a gram, and alanine (as a mixture of 'left-handed' and 'right-handed' forms) about 8p. (I may say that at these prices you get 99% pure material; thunderstorm simulations give you 99% impure material.) Not only are they difficult to make, but primed nucleotides are rather unstable. Sigma recommend that the DNA primed nucleotides should be shipped in dry ice to avoid decomposition in transit, and nucleotides generally should be stored at below freezing point. Expensive and fragile, primed nucleotides (or unprimed ones for that matter) are, I think, implausible as significant geochemical products - as minerals - at any time." (Cairns-Smith, 1985, pp.45-46. Emphasis original).

"In Genetic Takeover I listed 14 major hurdles that would have to be overcome for primed nucleotides to have been made on the primitive Earth - from the build-up of sufficient and separate concentrations of formaldehyde and cyanide to the final 'winding-up' of the nucleotides. In practice each of these processes would be subdivided into separate unit operations that would have to be suitably sequenced. In carrying out an organic synthesis in the laboratory there are tens or hundreds of little events: lifting, pouring, mixing, stirring, topping-up, decanting, adjusting etc., etc. There may not be much to these unit operations in themselves, but their sequencing has to be right. There is a manufacturing procedure that has to be followed, and when such a procedure is at all prolonged it becomes absurd to imagine it being carried out by chance. That is why simple amino acids are plausible probiotic products, primed nucleotides are not. It is not that one cannot imagine plausible unit processes on the primitive Earth that, taken together, might have yielded primed nucleotides - as one can imagine a coin falling heads a thousand times in a row. Yes, you can imagine the primitive Earth doing the kinds of things that the practical organic chemist does. You can see a pool evaporating in the sun to concentrate a solution, or two solutions happening to mix because a stream overflows, or a catalytic mineral dust being blown in by the wind. you can imagine filtrations, decantations, beatings, acidifications: you can imagine many such operations taking place through little geological and meteorological accidents. But to show that each step in a sequence is plausible is not to show that the sequence itself is plausible. But, you may say, with all the time in the world, and so much world, the right combinations of circumstances would happen some time? Is that not plausible? The answer is no: there was not enough time, and there was not enough world. Let me try to justify this. It would be a safe oversimplification, I think, to say that on average the 14 hurdles that I referred to in the making of primed nucleotides would each take 10 unit operations - that at least 140 little events would have to be appropriately sequenced. (If you doubt this, go and watch an organic chemist at work; look at all the things he actually does in bringing about what he would describe as 'one step' in an organic synthesis.) And it is surely on the optimistic side to suppose that, unguided, the appropriate thing happened at each point on one occasion in six. But if we take this as the kind of chance that we are talking about, then we can say that the odds against a successful unguided synthesis of a batch of primed nucleotide on the primitive Earth are similar to the odds against a six coming up every time with 140 throws of a dice. Is that sort of thing too much of a coincidence or not? There are 6 possible outcomes from throwing a dice once; 6 x 6 from a double throw; 6 x 6 x 6 from a triple throw; and 6 multiplied by itself 140 times from 140 throws. This is a huge number, represented approximately by a 1 followed by 109 zeros (i.e. ~ 10109). This is the sort of number of trials that you would have to make to have a reasonable chance of hitting on the one outcome that represents success. Throwing one dice once a second for the period of the Earth's history would only let you get through about 1015 trials: so you would need about 1094 dice. That is far more than the number of electrons in the observed Universe (estimated at around 1080). Of course you might argue that in practice a synthesis might be carried through in different ways, and that is true, but remember what generous allowances we made in cutting down the actual amount of sheer skill that organic synthesis requires. And remember too that a manufacturing procedure is not usually very forgiving about arbitrary modifications: it all too easily goes off the rails never to recover. This is especially true of chemical processes, where it is usually not good enough to add the acid at the wrong time or throw away the wrong solution, or even use an ultraviolet lamp of the wrong sort. Careless organic synthesis only works when the product that is wanted belongs to that inevitably small set of molecules that are especially stable - molecules like carbon dioxide and water, even perhaps glycine and adenine in a much more limited way. But nucleotides are not like that to judge from the price. One's intuition can lead one astray when thinking of the role of vast times and spaces in generating improbable structures. The moral is that vast times and spaces do not make all that much difference to the level of competence that pure chance can simulate. Even to get 14 sixes in a row (with one dice following the rules of our game) you should put aside some tens of thousands of years. But for 7 sixes a few weeks should do, and for 3 sixes a few minutes. This is all an indication of the steepness of that cliff-face that we were thinking about: a three-step process may be easily attributable to chance while a similar thirty-step process is quite absurd." (Cairns-Smith, 1985, pp.46-48).

"In one way the eye is eminently understandable. It is so like a camera that you wonder why there is not a law suit going on somewhere for breach of patent. The dark box, the lens, the iris diaphragm, the light-sensitive surface - each of these components is there in each case. At deeper levels there are certainly patentable differences in design. The light-sensitive area at the back of the eye is not actually much like a film. It, and many other things about the eye, are not by any means fully understood. But what is eminently understandable about the eye is that it should consist of rather definite components working in collaboration: as remarked ... this is what really efficient pieces of machinery are usually like. The bit that is not so clear about the eye -and a favourite challenge to Darwin - is how its components evolved when the whole machine will only work when all the components are there in place and working. Not that this problem is peculiar to the eye. Organisms are full of such machinery, and it is a widely held view that this appearance of having been designed is the key feature of living things." (Cairns-Smith, 1985, p.58).

"Evolution started with 'low-tech' organisms that did not have to be, and probably were not made from 'the molecules of life'. The first part of this statement might seem rather obvious were it not for the baleful conclusion ... that the design of any conceivable organism is inevitably very very complicated - with robot machines that can make other machines (including ones like themselves) under instructions held in an information store that can be replicated by means of yet more machinery whose construction is also specified in the information store and can be executed by the robot machines... But that was another Big Red Herring. It arose from the unstated assumption that you actually need any machinery at all in an organism. Once you think you will need any, then you will think that you need a lot. If, for example, the organism has to have some kind's of printing machinery in it, so that it can replicate its genetic information, then it will need manufacturing machinery also to make this printing machinery. And then this manufacturing machinery, some sort of robot, must also be able to make other machines exactly like itself. The circle closes eventually, but not until after a long journey - too long to be a practicable piece of engineering even for us, and much too long for Nature before its engineer, natural selection, had come on the scene." (Cairns-Smith, 1985, pp.65-66. Emphasis original).

"So why start on such a journey? Only the messages are in principle essential for evolution, although in practice there has to be a material to hold the messages and physical means for their replication. But the components for making the genetic material can be provided by the environment and so can any machinery that is needed to work with these components to bring about the replication of the messages. An organism need be no more than a naked geneif the environment is kind enough. ... But does this not simply shift the difficulty from the organism to the environment? Certainly it shifts the difficulty, but it does not simply shift the difficulty. The difficulty changes, and it becomes much less severe. There do not have to be robots anywhere. The environment might possibly have to provide some sort of printing or replicating machinery, but it would not have to provide another instructable machine to make such machinery. Indeed it is a matter to be decided whether the environment would even have to provide anything that could be called replicating machinery, or machinery of any sort. There would be but three things that an environment would have to provide for 'naked genes': (i) material units out of which new genes could be made (by template replication); (ii) conditions that would allow this to happen (whether or not these conditions included any sort of replication machinery); and (iii) reasons why some genes should do better than others (what are called selection pressures). It is true that now for RNA, the material units are probably too complex as primitive Earth products; and it looks as if a big enzyme has indeed to be included under (ii). But these are incidental features, not vital. They are specific objections to RNA. They depend on particular attributes of RNA molecules - and, anyway, we had decided in the last chapter that neither RNA nor DNA was the original genetic material." (Cairns-Smith, 1985, pp.66-67. Emphasis original).

"A particular trouble with organic molecules is that they only self-assemble properly when they are fairly large. Only then will there be a sufficient overall cohesion between the molecules, or between the parts of a foldable molecule. (A soap molecule needs to have a long tail; a protein chain has to have some twenty units in it before it will start to fold up coherently.) But large molecules are difficult to come by, especially at the kinds of concentration and purity needed for precise self-assembly processes. The massive objections that there are to the idea that good supplies of nucleotides could have been pre-arranged by the primitive Earth ... apply with a similar force to almost any organic molecule of that sort of size - the sort of minimum size needed for organic molecules to be able to self-assemble in water into higher-order structures." (Cairns-Smith, 1985, pp.72-73).

"In 1953, few if any were troubled by the tension between the new insights of Crick and Watson [Watson, J.D. & Crick, F.H., "Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids," Nature, Vol. 171, 1953, pp.737-738] on the one hand and Miller's [Miller, S.L., "A Production of Amino Acids Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions," Science, Vol. 117, pp.528-529] results on the other. ... In the decades since Miller's and Crick and Watson's reports, however, there have been indications that all is not well in the halls of biology. We have gained a far deeper appreciation of the extremely complex macromolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. The enlarged understanding of these complexities has precipitated new suggestions that the DNA mechanism may be more complex and the molecular organization more intricate and information-filled than was previously thought. The impressive complexities of proteins, nucleic acids, and other biological molecules are presently developed in nature only in living things. Unless it is assumed such complexity has always been present in an infinitely old universe, there must have been a time in the past when life appeared de novo out of lifeless, inert matter. How can the mere interaction of simple chemicals in the primordial ocean have produced life as it is presently understood? That is the question. The signs do not bode well for the standard answers given, and some investigators are suggesting that our two approaches will not converge." (Thaxton, C.B., Bradley, W.L. & Olsen, R.L., 1984, "The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories," Lewis & Stanley: Dallas TX, Second Printing, 1992, p.2).

"The Demise of the Role of Chance By 1966 a major change in scientific thought was underway. In Philadelphia a symposium was held to highlight these changes. [Moorhead, P.S. & Kaplan, M.M., eds., "Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution," Wistar Institute: Philadelphia PA, 1967] It was there that signs of an impending crisis first emerged. Symposium participants came together to discuss the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. One conclusion, expressed in the words of Murray Eden of MIT, was the need `to relegate the notion of randomness to a minor and non-crucial role' [Eden, M., "Heresy in the Halls of Biology," Scientific Research, November 1967, p.59] in our theories of origins. This conclusion was based on probability theory, which shows mathematically the odds against the chance formation of the highly complex molecular structure required for life. With the help of high-speed computers, programs could be run which simulated the billions-of-years' process based on the neo-Darwinian model of evolution. The results showed that the complexity of the biochemical world could not have originated by chance even within a time span of ten billion years. Eden's conclusion was a reasonable if unsettling one." (Thaxton, et al., 1984, pp.2-3. Emphasis original).

"Other symposium participants voiced similar views about chance or randomness. V.F. Weisskopf noted, `There is some suspicion that an essential point [about our theories of origins] is still missing.' [Weisskopf, V.F., in Moorhead, & Kaplan, 1967, p.100.] Eden suggested `new laws' as the missing piece in the puzzle of life's origin. [Eden, M., ibid, p.109] In his opening remarks as chairman, Nobel Prize-winning biologist Sir Peter Medawar said, `There is a pretty wide spread sense of dissatisfaction about what has come to be thought of as the accepted evolutionary theory in the English-speaking world, the so-called neo-Darwinian theory.' [Medawar, P, ibid, p.xi] It was Marcel Schutzenberger of the University of Paris, however, who intimated the true extent of the developing crisis when he expressed his belief that the problem of origins `cannot be bridged within the current conception of biology'. [Schutzenberger, M.P., ibid, p.73] (Emphasis added). These comments reflect the impotence of chance or randomness as a creative mechanism for life's origin. " (Thaxton, et al., 1984, p.3).

"The study of chemical evolution is strikingly similar to forensic science. Consistent with the uniformitarian view that life arose through processes still going on, numerous investigators have reported on laboratory observations and experiments which they offer as circumstantial evidence for the naturalistic origin of life. Though the conditions of the early earth are assumed to have been different from today's conditions, the processes are assumed to have been the same. According to this uniformitarian thinking, if we can reproduce in our laboratories today conditions as they were in the remote past, we should expect to obtain the kinds of changes that occurred then. This is the basis of prebiotic simulation experiments reported in chemical evolution literature. `Implicit in this [uniformitarian] assumption is the requirement that no supernatural agency "entered nature" at the time of the origin, was crucial to it, and then withdrew from history.' [Kenyon, D.H. & Steinman, G., "Biochemical Predestination," McGraw-Hill: New York, 1969, p.30]. (Actually all that is required for this assumption is that no intelligent-purposive-interruption or manipulation of the workings of natural forces ever occurred at the time of life's origin or since.)." (Thaxton, et al , 1984, pp.7-8).

"Concentrating Little PondsThe realization that an organic soup would have been too dilute for direct formation ofpolymers may seem devastating to chemical evolution views. However, as Bernal has written, `The original concept of the primitive soup must be rejected only in so far as it applies to oceans or large volumes of water, and interest must be transferred to reactions in more limited zones.' [Bernal, J.D., "Thermodynamics and kinetics of spontaneous generation," Nature, Vol. 186, 28 May 1960, p.694]. By this he meant lakes, pools, lagoons, and the like. These more limited zones might then have been the locus of life's origin rather than the ocean. The significance of these local places is their associated mechanisms for concentrating essential chemicals. By concentrating the monomers, the probability of their molecular interaction would have been increased, thus increasing reaction rates according to the law of mass action." (Thaxton, et al., 1984, pp.61-62. Emphasis original).

"Critique of Concentrating MechanismThere is no known geological evidence for organic pools, concentrated by these or other mechanisms, ever existing on this planet. ... Still, if by some means concentrated pools did develop, not only would the desired materials concentrate, but also the undesirable impurities. For example, an evaporating pond concentrating nonvolatiles such as amino acids would also concentrate sea salts such as NaCl ... Salt has greater affinity for water than do these organic compounds. Therefore, in order for the salt to be dissolved the organic compounds must precipitate out of solution. It is another type of `impurity,' however, that would have been the greatest obstacle to the successful concentration of organic compounds in limited zones. This would be the host of oceanic organic compounds such as amines, amino acids, aldehydes, ketones, sugars, carboxylic acids, etc. that would have destructively interacted in the ocean. The usual consequences of concentrating these would be, according to the law of mass action, merely an acceleration of the many destructive reactions (as well as the constructive reactions) that would also occur at slower rates in the more dilute ocean, as already discussed. ... Stemming from this discussion, however, it is our observation that what is needed is a natural sorting mechanism. The problem demands a means of selecting organic compounds and isolating them from other chemicals with which they could destructively interact. Yet there is nothing (but the need) to suggest that such a sorting mechanism ever existed on this planet. In other words, for these more limited zones (e.g., lakes, pools, lagoons), as for the ocean itself, it is difficult to imagine significant concentrations of essential organic compounds ever accumulating. As we have seen, degradative forces need to be taken into account in realistic estimates of concentrations, and they have frequently been ignored." (Thaxton, et al., 1984, pp.64-66. Emphasis original).

"Based on the foregoing geochemical assessment, we conclude that both in the atmosphere and in the various water basins of the primitive earth, many destructive interactions would have so vastly diminished, if not altogether consumed, essential precursor chemicals, that chemical evolution rates would have been negligible. The soup would have been too dilute for direct polymerization to occur. Even local ponds for concentrating soup ingredients would have met with the same problem. Furthermore, no geological evidence indicates an organic soup, even a small organic pond, ever existed on this planet. It is becoming clear that however life began on earth, the usually conceived notion that life emerged from an oceanic soup of organic chemicals is a most implausible hypothesis. We may therefore with fairness call this scenario `the myth of the prebiotic soup.'" (Thaxton, et al, 1984, p.66).

"Three relevant questions have been considered ... First, we considered the time available for chemical evolution. It was determined on the basis of evidence from molecular fossils and microfossils that the origin of life occurred almost instantaneously (geologically speaking), just after the earth's crust cooled and stabilized about 4.0 billion years ago. This leaves little more than 100 million years (if that) for any chemical evolution to occur. Second the early atmosphere of the earth was examined and found not to be the strongly reducing atmosphere popularized for the past thirty years. Instead, the consensus of scientists about the early atmosphere is shifting. At the time of this writing, there is wide agreement in adopting a more neutral primitive atmosphere consisting of CO2, N2, H2O, and perhaps 1% H2. There is a current controversy concerning whether the early earth and its atmosphere might actually have been oxidizing. Third, we examined the important question of the oxygen content of the early earth. ... The accumulating evidence for an oxygenic early earth and atmosphere heightens the mystery of life's origin. If this type of evidence continues to accumulate, chemical evolution theories may have to appeal to the random occurrence of fluctuating or localized reducing environments on the primitive earth. Such microenvironments could have been present (as shown by reduced minerals), but were they suitable or maintained long enough for the formation of life? The oddsof finding such a suitable niche on the primitive earth or a sufficient length of time are extremely small." (Thaxton, et al., 1984, pp.93-94).

"TrapsAll prebiotic heat, electrical discharge, and ultraviolet light (including photosensitization) experiments use traps. Traps allow for greater yields of product from equilibrium reactions in which dissolution would otherwise far outweigh synthesis ... Traps function by continually removing the small fraction of product formed by the reactions. As products are removed from the zone of their formation, additional reaction is continuously required to reestablish equilibrium. In this way, reactions can be productively prolonged until one of the reactants is finally consumed. ... Like the practice of concentrating chemical reactants, this technique is a legitimate means of collapsing time to manageable amounts. This removal process also shields the products from subsequent destruction by the energy source which produced them. However, Carl Sagan has aptly commented on this shielding effect in the experiments:

The problem we're discussing is a very general one. We use energy sources to make organic molecules. It is found that the same energy sources can destroy these organic molecules. The organic chemist has an understandable preference for removing the reaction products from the energy source before they are destroyed. But when we talk of the origin of life, I think we should not neglect the fact that degradation occurs as well as synthesis, and that the course of reaction may be different if the products are not preferentially removed. In reconstructing the origin of life, we have to imagine reasonable scenarios which somehow avoid this difficulty. (Emphasis added.)' [Sagan, C., in Fox, S.W., ed., "The Origins of Prebiological Systems and of Their Molecular Matrices," Academic Press: New York, 1965, pp.195-196]

(Thaxton, et al., 1984, pp.102-103. Emphasis original).

"The Concerto EffectLaboratory simulation experiments are usually carried out by employing one of various energy sources in isolation. This is a legitimate procedure since what is sought is the relative effect of each energy source. It is true, too, that the total effect is merely the sum of the effects of isolated energy sources. What often gets ignored, however, is that not only are the synthetic effects summed, but the destructive effects also. ... these energy sources act together or in concert in the natural situation, both in synthesis and destruction of organic compounds. One energy source destroys what another sourceproduces. Destructionpredominates! Protection from energy sources is not the only concern. Many laboratory experiments use carefully selected, highly purified, and often concentrated reactants in solutions isolated from other constituents of the soup mixture. ... if a chemical reaction occurs slowly in dilute solution (viz., the primitive ocean), it will occur much more rapidly in concentrated solution (viz., the investigator's flask). In this way, investigators seek to compress into manageable laboratory time chemical reactions that normally would have taken millions of years. ... even if natural concentrating mechanisms were not effective on the early earth." (Thaxton, et al., 1984, p.104. Emphasis original).

"Isolated Reactants Practically all simulated ocean experiments reported in the scientific literature have been based on the assumption that if two or three chemicals react when isolated from the soup mixture, they will also react in the same way in the presence of diverse chemicals in the soup. ... In spite of the fact that the procedure of isolating reactants is almost universally used and assumed to be valid, for all practical purposes, this assumption is false in the general case. It is false because it overlooks the synergism of multiple reactions, the Concerto Effect. A mixture has a characteristic behavior of its own; it is not the simple sum of its individual components. All components in a mixture have definite affinities for reacting with each other. Consequently, soup mixture reactions do not equal the sum of the individual isolated reactions. ...substance A might react with substance B when isolated from substances C, D, and E. When all these substances are mixed together, however, competing reactions can be envisioned which assure that virtually no product accumulates from the reaction . between A and B. Also, the reaction between A and B may begin as it would in isolation, only to be interrupted at some later step. Simulation experiments have thus produced some products which conceivably would never occur in the primitive soup." (Thaxton, et al., 1984, pp.104-105. Emphasis original).

"Geochemical plausibility scale for evaluating prebiotic simulation experiments. Experimental techniques (conditions) are arranged according to the degree of investigator interference. At some point along the scale investigator involvement reaches a threshold, beyond which investigator interference is illegitimate. ... Continuing up the scale, we come to spark and shock wave experiments, each used in isolation from other energy sources. We rank these experiments more implausible than those whose success is dependent on higher concentration of chemicals, because no conceivable natural means for isolating energy sources is known. Use of both heat and selected wavelengths of UV light is more implausible still. Not only is there the lack of means for isolating them from other energy sources, but greater doubt arises about their geochemical plausibility. It may be argued that using energy in spark experiments several orders of magnitude greater than could have existed on the early earth merely `speeds up' the process. No comparable argument applies for heat. For example, increasing temperature to 1000°C not only accelerates reaction rates, but destroys organic products. In the case of ultraviolet light, there is no natural filter known that would justify use of selected wavelengths (i.e., < 2000 Å) of light while excluding the longer wavelengths more destructive to some essential organic compounds. Finally, to indicate greatest geochemical implausibility, we put experiments using selected chemicals, isolated from other soup ingredients, at the top of the scale. It is difficult to tell whether use of selected wavelengths of UV is more plausible than the use of isolated chemicals. In any case, we believe both are very implausible conditions." (Thaxton, et al., 1984, pp.106-107).

"Determining Acceptable Investigator Involvement When does experimenter interference become illegitimate? As basic as this question is to the discussion of simulation experiments, it is very seldom mentioned as a problem. ... Since all experiments are performed by an experimenter, they must involve investigator intervention. Yet experiments must be disqualified as prebiotic simulations when a certain class of investigator influence is crucial to their success. This is seen by analogy to the generally held requirement that no outside or supernatural agency was allowed to enter nature at the time of life's origin, was crucial to it, and then withdrew from history. [Kenyon, D.H. & Steinman, G., "Biochemical Predestination," McGraw-Hill: New York, 1969, p.30] We can apply this principle through a careful extension of the analogy. In the preparation of a prebiotic simulation experiment, the investigator creates the setting, supplies the aqueous medium, the energy, the chemicals, and establishes the boundary conditions. This activity produces the general background conditions for the experiment, and while it is crucial to the success of the experiment, it is quite legitimate because it simulates plausible early earth conditions. The interference of the investigator becomes crucial in an illegitimate sense, however wherever laboratory conditions are not warranted by analogy to reliably plausible features of the early earth itself. Thus the illegitimate intervention of the investigator is directly proportional to the geochemical implausibility of the condition arising from experimental design and/or the investigator's procedure, the illegitimate interference being greatest when such plausibility is missing altogether. With this in mind, it seems reasonable to suggest that permissible interference by the investigator would include developing plausible design features of the experiment, adjusting the initial reaction mixture, beginning the input of free energy to drive the reaction at the outset, and performing whatever minimal disturbance to the system is necessary to withdraw portions of the reaction products at various stages for analysis. Usually, in laboratory experiments, an experimenter employs a host of manipulative interventions in an effort to guide natural processes down specific nonrandom chemical pathways. In other words it is the character of the constraint that determines the result. In some chemical syntheses, for example, it may be necessary to combine reactants in a particular order, or vary the rates of addition in order to control temperature, to adjust pH at a crucial color change, to remove products of reaction after ten minutes instead of twenty minutes, etc., etc. Such manipulations are the hallmark of intelligent, exogenous interference and should not be employed in any prebiotic experiment. The arrangement of experimental techniques (conditions) ... represents a scale or continuum of investigator interference. At some point on the scale, a degree of implausibility is reached where the experiment can no longer be considered acceptable. Beyond that point, there is no analogy between the techniques and reliably plausible prebiotic conditions. The experimenter who deviates from plausible conditions is like an actor who has forgotten his lines and begins to ad-lib. Such techniques constitute illegitimate interference, and cannot be given the same status as those lying within the threshold of acceptability." (Thaxton, et al., 1984, pp.108-109. Emphasis original).

"Summarizing the above discussion it is our view that for each of the experimental techniques (conditions) listed as being above the line of crucial but acceptable interference, the investigator has played a highly significant but illegitimate role in experimental success. Brooks and Shaw have commented on this after a review of abiotic experiments:

These experiments ... claim abiotic synthesis for what has in fact been produced and designed by highly intelligent and very much biotic man.' [Brooks, J. & Shaw, G., "Origin and Development of Living Systems," Academic Press: New York, 1973, p.212]

In other words, for each of the unacceptable experimental techniques, the investigator has established experimental constraints, imposing intelligent influence upon a supposedly `prebiotic earth.'Where this informative intervention of the investigator is ignored, the illusion of prebiotic simulation is fostered. This unfortunate state of affairs will continue until the community of origin-of-life researchers agree on criteria for experiment acceptability. If the techniques representing investigator interference are to be afforded the status of valid simulation, the burden must remain with the investigators to demonstrate their plausibility. This is nothing more than the demand of good science." (Thaxton, et al., 1984, p.110).

"Morowitz [Morowitz, H.J., "Energy Flow in Biology," Academic Press: New York, 1968, p.66] has estimated the increase in the chemical bonding energy as one forms the bacterium Escherichia coli from simple precursors to be 0.0095 erg, or an average of 0.27 ev/atom for the 2 x 1010 atoms in a single bacterial cell. This would be thermodynamically equivalent to having water in your bathtub spontaneously heat up to 360 degrees C, happily a most unlikely event." (Thaxton, et al., 1984, p.121).

"One way out of the problem would be to extend the concept of natural selection to the pre-living world of molecules. A number of authors have entertained this possibility, although no reasonable explanation has made the suggestion plausible. Natural selection is a recognized principle of differential reproduction which presupposes the existence of at least two distinct types of self-replicating molecules. Dobzhansky appealed to those doing origin-of-life research not to tamper with the definition of natural selection when he said: `I would like to plead with you, simply, please realize you cannot use the words `natural selection' loosely. Prebiological natural selection is a contradiction in terms.' [Dobzhansky, T.G., in Fox, ibid, p.310] Bertalanffy made the point even more cogently: `Selection, i.e., favored survival of "better" precursors of life, already presupposes self-maintaining, complex, open systems which may compete; therefore selection cannot account for the origin of such systems' [von Bertalanffy L., "Robots, Men and Minds," George Braziller: New York NY, 1967, p.82]" (Thaxton, et al., 1984, p.147).

"We believe the problem is analogous to that of the medieval alchemist who was commissioned to change copper into gold. Energy flow through a system can do chemical work and produce an otherwise improbable distribution of energy in the system (e.g., a water heater). Thermal entropy, however, seems to be physically independent from the information content of living systems which we have analyzed and called configurational entropy. As was pointed out, Yockey has noted that negative thermodynamic entropy (thermal) has nothing to do with information, and no amount of energy flow through the system and negative thermal entropy generation can produce even a small amount of information. You can't get gold out of copper, apples out of oranges, or information out of negative thermal entropy. There does not seem to be any physical basis for the widespread assumption implicit in the idea that an open system is a sufficient explanation for the complexity of life. As we have previously noted, there is neither a theoretical nor an experimental basis for this hypothesis. There is no hint in our experience of any mechanistic means of supplying the necessary configurational entropy work. Enzymes and human intelligence, however, do it routinely."(Thaxton, et al., 1984, p.183).

"One characteristic feature of the above critique needs to be emphasized. We have not simply picked out a number of details within chemical evolution theory that are weak, or without adequate explanation for the moment. For the most part this critique is based on crucial weaknesses intrinsic to the theory itself. Often it is contended that criticism focuses on present ignorance `Give us more time to solve the problems,' is the plea. After all, the pursuit of abiogenesis is young as a scientific enterprise. It will be claimed that many of these problems are mere state-of-the-art gaps. And, surely some of them are. Notice, however, that the sharp edge of this critique is not what we do not know, but what we do know. Many facts have come to light in the past three decades of experimental inquiry into life's beginning. With each passing year the criticism has gotten stronger. The advance of science itself is what is challenging the nation that life arose on earth by spontaneous (in a thermodynamic sense) chemical reactions." (Thaxton, et al., 1984, p.185. Emphasis original).

"Over the years a slowly emerging line or boundary has appeared which shows observationally the limits of what can be expected from matter and energy left to themselves, and what can be accomplished only through what Michael Polanyi has called `a profoundly informative intervention.' [Polanyi, M., "Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry," Chemical Engineering News, August 21, 1967, pp.54-66, p.54]. When it is acknowledged that most so-called prebiotic simulation experiments actually owe their success to the crucial but illegitimate role of the investigator, a new and fresh phase of the experimental approach to life's origin can then be entered. Until then however, the literature of chemical evolution will probably continue to be dominated by reports of experiments in which the investigator, like a metabolizing Maxwell Demon, will have performed work on the system through intelligent, exogenous intervention. Such work establishes experimental boundary conditions, and imposes intelligent influence/control over a supposedly `prebiotic' earth. As long as this informative interference of the investigator is ignored, the illusion of prebiotic simulation will be fostered. We would predict that this practice will prove to be a barrier to solving the mystery of life's origin." (Thaxton, et al., 1984, p.185. Emphasis original).

"Special Creation by a Creator Beyond the Cosmos ?. Special Creation by a Creator beyond the cosmos holds there was once a time in the past when matter was in a simple arrangement, inert and lifeless. Then at a later time matter was in the state of biological specificity sufficient for bearing and sustaining life. Special Creation (whether from within the cosmos or beyond it) differs from abiogenesis in holding that the source which produced life was intelligent. Throughout history, many writers have attempted to describe the work of the Creator. What they all seem to hold in common is the idea that an intelligent Creator informed inert matter by shaping it as a potter fashions clay. Some representations are quite anthropomorphic, others less so. But there is considerable agreement that somehow an active intellect produced life." (Thaxton, et al., 1984, p.200).

"Operation Science and the God Hypothesis It is widely appreciated that from its beginning modern science has been concerned with finding and describing orderly pattern in the recurring events of nature. To do this a well-defined method is used. Data are gathered through observation and experimentation. As data are gathered, theories are proposed to explain the behavior or operation of the phenomena investigated. ... Notice, however, that this approach to testing theories only works if there is some pattern of recurring events against which theories can be checked and falsified if they are false. Through repeated observation attention is focused on a class of events, each of which is similar. The equations describing the behavior of the class would be applicable to any of its individual members. ... Such theories are operation theories. That is, they refer to the ongoing operation of the universe. We shall call the domain of operation theories operation science for these theories are concerned with the recurring phenomena of nature. Examples of operation science include the recurring motion of planets about the sun, the swinging of a pendulum, the parabolic trajectory of a cannonball, a single cell turning by stages into a fully formed organism, the recurrent cubic structure of table salt crystallizing out of water solution and the migration of a Monarch butterfly. These and many other phenomena have been accounted for in the language of operation science. Because of its familiarity and long, successful history, it is surely what most people think of when they think about science." (Thaxton, et al.,1984, p.203. Emphasis original).

"Origin Science On the other hand an understanding of the universe includes some singular events, such as origins. Unlike the recurrent operation of the universe, origins cannot be repeated for experimental test. The beginning of life, for example, just won't repeat itself so we can test our theories. In the customary language of science, theories of origins (origin science) cannot be falsified by empirical test if they are false, as can theories of operation science. How then are origins investigated? The method of approach is appropriately modified to deal with unrepeatable singular events. The investigation of origins may be compared to sleuthing an unwitnessed murder ... Such scenarios of reconstruction may be deemed plausible or implausible. Hypotheses of origin science, however, are not empirically testable or falsifiable since the datum needed for experimental test (namely, the origin) is unavailable. In contrast to operation science where the focus is on a class of many events, origin science is concerned with a particular event, i.e., a class of one. ... Pasteur's falsification of spontaneous generation was possible only because it was said to recur in the domain of operation science. Appropriate testing against nature falsified the notion of spontaneous generation. The best we can ever hope to achieve with wrong ideas about origins is to render them implausible. By the nature of the case, true falsification is out of the question." (Thaxton, et al.,1984, p.204. Emphasis original).

"In spite of this fundamental difference between origin science and operation science, there is today very little recognition of it, and an almost universal convention of excluding the divine from origin science as well as from operation science. This has occurred without any careful prior analysis of the problem to see if the exclusion is valid in the case of origin science. It seems to have been merely assumed. An example of this exclusion by assumption instead of valid argument comes from this statement by Orgel: `Any "living" system must come into existence either as a consequence of a long evolutionary process or a miracle.... Since, as scientists, we must not postulatemiracles we must suppose that the appearance of "life" is necessarily preceded by a period of evolution.' [Orgel, L.E., "The Origins of Life," John Wiley & Sons: New York, 1973, p. 192] We agree with Orgel that miracles must not be posited for operation science. We disagree with Orgel however, and others, when it is merely assumed that the exclusion of the divine from origin science is valid. This has not been demonstrated." (Thaxton, et al.,1984, pp.204-205. Emphasis original).

"Metaphysical Commitment vs. Unreason If metaphysical positions have such a controlling influence ... this raises a practical question. In the face of contradictory evidence, when is one to be praised for metaphysical commitments and chided for unreasonable faith? The answer one gives to this question depends in large measure on the metaphysical stance already adopted. To illustrate, consider George Wald's discussion of how biologists responded after Pasteur's refutation of spontaneous generation. Says Wald: `We tell this story [of Pasteur's experiments] to beginning students of biology as though it represents a triumph of reason over mysticism. In fact it is very nearly the opposite. The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative, to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position.' [Wald, G., "The Origin of Life", in Folsome, C.E., ed., "Life: Origin and Evolution," Readings from Scientific American, W.H. Freeman: San Francisco CA, 1979, p.47]. Wald is saying that there are times when it is clearly unreasonable to follow the evidence where it leads. When? Those times when following the evidence would lead one to the supernatural. This is an example of metaphysical commitment to naturalism in the face of contradictory evidence." (Thaxton, et al.,1984, pp.208-209. Emphasis original).

"Clair E. Folsome represents another example of commitment to metaphysical naturalism in spite of contradictory evidence. Folsome critiqued the abiogenesis that Wald had upheld. Folsome pointed out the extreme dilution of the primitive soup, the scarcity of organic nitrogen in the early sediments, and the grave deficiencies in the concentration mechanism proposed for the primitive water basins. He then noted: `Every time we examine the specifics of the theories presented by Oparin and Bernal, current information seems to contradict them.' [Folsome, C.E., "Introduction," in Folsome, ed., 1979, pp.2-4, p.3] Does Folsome then entertain doubt as to the plausibility of the Oparin-Bernal hypothesis? No. This also is apparently a time when it would be unreasonable to follow the evidence where it leads. Instead, Folsome expresses his commitment, `yet, in the main, they were right [in postulating that some sort of chemical evolution had occurred]...their models were wrong, but the central theme they pursued seems even more right now than before.' [Ibid., p.3] (Emphasis added.)" (Thaxton, et al.,1984, p.208. Emphasis original).

"Special Creation and the EvidenceSpecial Creation by a Creator beyond the cosmos envisions a prepared earth with oxidizing conditions, an earth ready to receive life. It is suggestive then that there has been accumulating evidence for an oxidizing early earth and atmosphere. If the early earth were really oxidizing it would not only support creation, it would also be difficult to even imagine chemical evolution. Similarly, the short time interval (< 170 my) between earth's cooling and the earliest evidence of life supports the notion of creation. And, of course, if life were really created it would account for there being so little nitrogen in Precambrian sediments (there never was a prebiotic soup). In addition, Special Creation accords well with the observed boundary between what has been done in the laboratory by abiotic means and what has been done only through interference by the experimenter. If an intelligent Creator produced the first life, then it may well be true that this observed boundary in the laboratory is real, and will persist independent of experimental progress or new discoveries about natural processes. Also an intelligent Creator could conceivably accomplish the quite considerable configurational entropy work necessary to build informational macromolecules and construct true cells. As Fong has said: `the question of the ultimate source of information is not trivial. In fact it is the basic and central philosophical and theoretical problem. The essence of the theory of Divine Creation is that the ultimate source of information has a separate, independent existence beyond and before the material system, this being the main point of the Johannine Prologue.' [Fong, P., in Locker, A., ed., "Biogenesis, Evolution, Homeostasis," Springer-Verlag: New York, 1973, p. 93]" (Thaxton, et al.,1984, pp.209-210. Emphasis original).

"It is doubtful that any would deny that an intelligent Creator could conceivably prepare earth with oxidizing conditions and create life. And, of course, the data discussed above are consistent (and compatible} with this view of Special Creation. What we would like to know, of course, is whether an intelligent Creator did create life. The question, unfortunately, is beyond the power of science to answer. Another question which can be answered, however, is whether such a view as Special Creation is plausible ... How then does one determine whether an origin science scenario is plausible? The principles of causality and uniformity are used. Cause means that necessary and sufficient condition that alone can explain the occurrence of a given event. By the principle of uniformity is meant that the kinds of causes we observe producing certain effects today can be counted on to have produced similar effects in the past. We an go back into the past with some measure of plausibility only by assuming the kind of cause needed to produce that kind of effect in the present was also needed to produce it in the past. In other words `the present is a key to the past.' As we saw, this is how scientists have arrived at the reconstructed scenario of a prebiotic earth. What makes views of abiogenesis legitimate as origin science then is the assumed legitimacy of cause-effect reasoning and the principle of uniformity. The dilemma for chemical evolution, however, has been failure to identify any contemporary example of specified complexity ... arising by abiotic causes. What is needed is to identify in the present an abiotic cause of specified complexity. This would then provide a basis for extrapolating its use into the past as a conceivable abiotic cause for supplying the configuration entropy work in the synthesis of primitive DNA, protein, and cells. The failure to identify such a contemporary abiotic cause of specified complexity is yet another way to support our conclusion that chemical evolution is an implausible hypothesis." (Thaxton, et al.,1984, p.210. Emphasis original).

"Consider, for example, the matter of accounting for the informational molecule, DNA. We have observational evidence in the present that intelligent investigators can (and do) build contrivances to channel energy down non-random chemical pathways to bring about some complex chemical synthesis, even gene building. May not the principle of uniformity then be used in a broader frame of consideration to suggest that DNA had an intelligent cause at the beginning? Usually the answer given is no. But theoretically, at least, it would seem the answer should be yes in order to avoid the charge that the deck is stacked in favor of naturalism. We know that in numerous cases certain effects always have intelligent causes, such as dictionaries, sculptures, machines and paintings we reason by analogy that similar effects also have intelligent causes. For example, after looking up to see `BUY FORD' spelled out in smoke across the sky we infer the presence of a skywriter even if we heard or saw no airplane. We would similarly conclude; the presence of intelligent activity were we to come upon an elephant-shaped topiary in a cedar forest. In like manner an intelligible communication via radio signal from some distant galaxy would be widely hailed as evidence of and intelligent source. Why then doesn't the message sequence on the DNA molecule also constitute prima facie evidence for an intelligent source? After all, DNA information is not just analogous to a message sequence such as Morse code, it is such a message sequence [Yockey, H.P., "Self Organization Origin of Life Scenarios and Information Theory," J. Theoret. Biol. Vol. 91, 1981, p. 13]. The so-called Shannon information laws apply equally to the genetic code and to the Morse code. True, our knowledge of intelligence has been restricted to biology-based advanced organisms, but it is currently argued by some that intelligence exists in complex non-biological computer circuitry. If our minds are capable of imagining intelligence freed frombiology inthis sense, then why not in the sense of an intelligent being before biological life existed?" (Thaxton, et al., 1984, pp.210-211. Emphasis original).

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